In providing cellular telephone services, telecommunications providers are generally interested in providing the highest quality of service while still maximizing the capacity of the network. Sometimes these are competing objectives. With respect to network capacity, cellular network operators desire to maximize network system capacity. Higher network capacity results in less rejections of call requests and, in-turn, increased customer satisfaction. Therefore, it is desirable to increase network capacity.
In providing the highest quality of service, high rate voice coding or vocoding is the technology behind most modern voice compression techniques and has been utilized to improve voice quality for cellular calls. As is known, a vocoder converts the spoken words of the caller into a digital signal and then reconverts the signal into an audible sound so that the words can be heard by the intended recipient. These high rate vocoders provide good voice quality however, in general, these high coding/decoding rates utilize more network capacity than lower rate vocoders.
A vocoder is typically a computer algorithm or program which operates on a digitized voice signal generated by an Analog-to-Digital converter. The vocoder algorithm first encodes a voice signal by processing it in varying ways in order to represent it with some small number of bits. A vocoder also contains a decoding function which is able to reconstruct the voice waveform from these bits. Many different vocoder algorithms have been developed which employ different types of processing and depending on the method of processing, some algorithms perform considerable better or worse than others. Vocoder performance is generally measured in terms of compression rate (i.e. how few bits are required to represent the voice signal) plus the voice quality (i.e. how much distortion does the encoding/decoding process introduce into the reconstructed voice signal). Additional performance factors include the complexity of the algorithm, in terms of the amount of computing power required to run the algorithm, and its robustness to factors such as background noise and bit errors which are often present in the real world. Due to these differences, selection of the best vocoder is one of the larger challenges faced by the network designer.
One relatively new vocoding method is the AMBE® Vocoder developed by Digital Voice System, Inc. of Burlington, Mass. The AMBE® class of vocoders require roughly half the bandwidth of earlier vocoders, such as the Vector Sum Excited Linear Prediction (VSELP) method. Moreover, these modern vocoders have the ability to interleave several calls onto a single channel at a given frequency. Such vocoders can also be operated to interleave more or fewer calls onto a given channel, depending on the available bandwidth and desired call quality. For example, such vocoders have the ability to be assigned to a call as a so-called full 3:1 call or a split 3:1 call, where a full 3:1 call will be interleaved with two other calls onto a single channel and a split 3:1 call will be interleaved with five other calls for a total of six call on a single channel. There is, however, a trade off in that the more calls that are interleaved onto a channel, the lower the call quality will be. That is, increasing network capacity to handle additional calls by implementing split 3:1 encoding tends to result in a corresponding decrease in call quality. The problem lies in identifying the optimum conditions under which split 3:1 encoding should be used so as to maintain as high a call quality as possible, while providing increased network capacity. Determining these conditions has proved to be a difficult task. Thus, despite the recent advancements in vocoding technology, there is still a need for optimizing vocoder resource allocation.